Data and Digital Futures: Interoperability update

VIEW - Ministry of Health chief standards advisor Alastair Kenworthy

The Health Information Standards Organisation published an Interoperability Roadmap last September and progress has been made in a number of important areas since. 
 
New application programming interfaces (APIs) are now in user acceptance testing for the National Health Index (NHI) and Health Provider Index (HPI). The new APIs use the HL7 FHIR standard that makes it easy to exchange data in a common format. A date will eventually be set for retiring the ‘SOAP’ web services that the new API replaces. 
 
Scheduled updates to the SNOMED New Zealand Edition and New Zealand Pathology Observations Code Sets (NZPOCS) were released in October 2020 and April 2021. New codes were added to the SNOMED NZ Edition for recording clinical information in hospital emergency departments. Other enhancements were to the set of consumer-friendly terms for the most common health and wellness issues. Consumer-friendly terms are published in both English and te reo Māori.
 
In June, the SNOMED NZ Edition became available for the first time via an API that health providers’ IT systems can be connected to. Using the API removes the need to load the six-monthly release files, improves the user experience and contributes to data quality. Users can easily select the terms they need to record relevant clinical information and share it with patients, whānau and other health professionals. 
 
To provide this service we are hosting in the cloud an instance of the software product Snowstorm, the free and open source SNOMED CT terminology server from SNOMED International. New Zealand has invested in Snowstorm as one of SNOMED International’s forty member countries. The service supports the introduction of SNOMED CT to emergency departments and other immediate needs. The service is available via its FHIR API at https://snomednz.digital.health.nz/fhir

Beyond Snowstorm, we will select other software to extend the service to non-SNOMED code sets, such as the NZ Pathology Observation Code Sets (NZPOCS) and selected code sets from the International Standards Organisation (ISO), HL7 International, Statistics New Zealand and other standards organisations.

The NZ Formulary not-for-profit organisation has recently announced plans for a FHIR API to serve the NZ Universal List of Medicines and NZ Formulary. 

The New Zealand Health Terminology Service (NZHTS) is the name we are giving the complete set of tools and APIs used to create and distribute all these nationally-standard terminologies and code sets. 

We are also purchasing software to create a simple-to-use library of published FHIR design documents, to be called the New Zealand FHIR Registry. 
 
We are tracking progress against each milestone of the Interoperability Roadmap publish a quarterly status report on the Ministry website this month.

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